Leaving Alexandria

by Richard Holloway

  After the club, before heading back to Kenmure Street, I went back to Lilias’s for hot chocolate. Up a grotty stair into the flat she shared with a teacher friend, the hallway full of boxes of baby clothes and children’s toys, the living room warm and cheerful, a fire burning in the grate. It wasn’t long before I decided to move in next door. Across the landing was the nursery Lilias had started to give single mothers a break. Not that ‘single mothers’ was the phrase in use. Social workers talked then about families where the father was not present. Some of them were not present because they’d done a runner, others were in prison. A lot of washing and delousing of children went on in that flat, but it was a happy place. With the help of private gifts and support from Save the Children and a squad of volunteers, they cared for sixty children. The flats on the stair all had the same layout. Going clockwise in Lilias’s flat, anticlockwise in the nursery, the kitchen was immediately next to the front door, facing the back court, followed by the bathroom and another room at the back. To the front there was a large living room and two other rooms, one quite small. In Glasgow housing lingo, these flats were four rooms and a kitchen. I moved into the back bedroom of the nursery. It was noisy during the day, but I had it to myself in the evenings and at weekends. The only furniture I owned was an old-fashioned desk. A friend donated a single bed that had been made for his brother, about my height he said. I rigged up a bookcase, acquired a two-bar electric fire, an old easy chair, a wastepaper basket, and moved in on a Friday afternoon. I was happy to be Lilias’s neighbour, and she was happy to have a man on the stair.

  Lilias Graham came from a family that descended from King Robert III of Scotland. Among her ancestors was Graham of Claverhouse, mortally wounded at the Battle of Killiecrankie in 1689 while fighting on the Stuart side against the Hanoverians. Maybe that accounted for the hint of Jacobite panache in Lilias. Born in London in the last year of World War I, her family moved to an Elizabethan farmhouse in Suffolk in 1923, where she was educated at home. When she was four she visited her grandmother, the Duchess of Montrose, at Buchanan Castle on the banks of Loch Lomond, where she announced that she intended to live in Scotland when she grew up. It took her thirty years to get there. Before that was work in the Docklands in East London and as a cook sergeant in the ATS during the war. After the war she worked with the United Nations Refugee and Relief Agency in Egypt, Palestine and Greece. Then to Klagenfurt in the British Zone in Austria, still working for UNRRA in refugee camps. She got back to Britain in 1948, worn out and suffering from a brain tumour, which was successfully operated on. It was then she made good that promise to herself to come home to Scotland. She wrote to the Bishop of Glasgow, asking if she could live and work in Gorbals. The Bishop, thrilled by the offer, told her he would be happy to license her for work in the Gorbals, but she could not possibly live there because it would be too dangerous. After a year of commuting from Ibrox, Lilias courteously informed him that she was going in. She moved into Abbotsford Place in 1954 and stayed till the slum clearances of the early 1970s. During those years she became a legend among the Glasgow poor.

  What impressed me most about her was the contrast she posed to the imperatives of my own nature. Schooled in the monastic routine of filling every minute with purposeful activity, I was impressed by Lilias’s relaxed attitude to life. She did not give the impression of working at all. She never seemed to be on or off duty. She was just there, so things happened around her. Children played in her flat. There was the youth club in Abbotsford Lane. The Auld Hens, a women’s group, met one night a week in her sitting room. There was the nursery next door. There was a holiday scheme for children – most of whom had never been out of Gorbals – who were billeted with families in the countryside for a couple of weeks during the summer holidays. Streams of trainee social workers from the London School of Economics came to learn what they could about working in deprived communities without patronising the poor. And there was a constant flow of callers to her famous red door. Throughout this she emanated no sense of strain.

  She slept late most days, something I was mildly shocked by. She went to concerts, loved expensive chocolates, took holidays abroad, particularly in Austria and Greece, countries the war had taught her to love. She was a toff. She sounded like a toff – I tried unsuccessfully to copy her pronunciation of cross as ‘crawss’ – but there was not the slightest shred of class-consciousness in her. I witnessed this ease of being with complicated admiration. She was a whole person, integrated, unself-conscious. I was divided, self-aware, watching myself playing this new game. And still crawling off to confession to unload the latest cargo of guilt, still living:

  . . . this tormented mind

  With this tormented mind tormenting yet.38

  Lilias never talked about why she was there, and never gave the slightest impression that she thought there was anything unusual in living in one of the most notorious slums in Europe. Afflicted with the theological habit, I wanted an explanation for her presence in a community that was galaxies away from her own background. I found it, to my own satisfaction, if not to hers, in the word presence itself, which was emerging at the time as a descriptive term for a radical approach to the Christian Faith that acted rather than spoke. There was concern that the Church was being pushed out of the inner city into the suburbs. A movement that had started among the dispossessed now seemed to flourish only among the middle classes. And a deeper anxiety was burgeoning. A sense was growing that the old ways of understanding and talking about God were being eroded by a secular self-confidence that had no need of God to explain the world. It was getting uncomfortably close to me. The paradox of my own relationship with God was an increasing sense of loss accompanied by an undiminished sense of demand. Half the time I wasn’t sure God was there, yet a powerful sense of obligation to something remained. What remained was Jesus. Whether he was God, as the Church claimed – whether, indeed, there was a God for him to be – a demand came through Jesus that could be separated from questions about God, a demand isolated by Jesus himself when he said it was actions not words that God was interested in, mercy and justice not professions of belief. He left us with the paradox of what sounded like God’s atheism: it wasn’t creeds he wanted, but the battle against oppression.

  It was obvious that, with or without belief in God, what Jesus demanded was needed as much in our time as in his. This was still a cruel unequal world, as cruel as when Jesus had startled its leaders by telling them God was not on their side, but on the side of those they trampled on. The beautiful thing about this line was that it parked the supernatural question in a lay-by – permanently. You no longer needed to play conceptual games with God. What you had to do was clothe the naked, feed the hungry and give cold water to the thirsty. God was no longer on his supernatural throne. The place to find him was among the dispossessed, among the wretched of the earth. And the idea of presence expressed both ends of this paradox. Henceforth, God would be found among the poor. If you were seeking him, only there would you find him. The other end of the paradox was even sharper: if you want to make God known to the poor, don’t speak to them about him, become poor like them, be present beside them. The flow was from word to work, from theory to practice, from theology to action. This was the narrative that had driven Albert Schweitzer to Africa. He wrote of this period in his life:

  I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk. For years I had been giving myself out in words . . . this new form of activity I could not represent to myself as being talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting it into practice.39

  In 1913 he went with his wife to Lambaréné, in what was then the French colony of Gabon, as a doctor. He spent his life there, no longer talking about Jesus but following his way of practical love. Presence!

  Lilias was like and unlike Schweitzer. Like him she did not talk about faith, she acted. But she was unlike him in that there seemed to be no heavy theological motive for her presence in Gorbals,
no wrestling with an elusive God, no bargaining. She was intrigued by my need to theologise everything, to darken everything with thought. That was because there was an uncomplicated goodness about her, a transparency that cast no shadow. Her relationship with organised religion could have been described as affectionate toleration. She liked going to Church, but not too often and never for too long. She enjoyed the quiet rituals of the Christian year. She was the only person I knew who decorated her Christmas tree with real candles, a tradition she’d learned in Austria. She liked these practices because they added grace and beauty to life. The poetry of quiet religion appealed to her. The doctrinal obsessions of noisy religion bored her. She ignored the wars between the rival priesthoods in Christianity, and she herself was never interested in joining the uniformed branch of the Church – not that it would have been open to her had she wanted it. She lived in Gorbals not out of grim duty but out of Franciscan gaiety. She intrigued me because she completely lacked the theological angst I had in abundance. The paradox of the god who abandoned metaphysics for identification with the dispossessed would have been too ‘highfalutin’ for her. But there was another remarkable person in Gorbals who was no stranger to agonistic theology. And I found him both compelling and threatening. Lilias’s uncomplicated goodness did not threaten me. Geoff Shaw, a more complex figure, did.

  A few years after Lilias moved into Gorbals, a group of Church of Scotland ministers followed her into the area. They had been given permission by the Kirk to establish a ministry in Gorbals outside normal parish structures. There were three ordained ministers in the group: Walter Fyfe, John Jardine and Geoff Shaw. Walter and John were married. Geoff was single. The Fyfes took a house at the top of Abbotsford Lane. The Jardines moved into the flat in Abbotsford Place, which became Lilias’s nursery later when they left the group. Geoff moved into a small flat in Cleland Street, close to the Crown Street Baths, which he used for his ablutions. Geoff and Walter had done a year’s graduate study at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where they had been influenced by the work of the East Harlem Protestant Parish. Abandoning church-based ministry, the East Harlem ministers and their families lived in apartments in the violent neighbourhood and operated from store-front ministries. And that was the pattern Geoff and Walter wanted to replicate in Gorbals.

  It soon became obvious to me that Geoff was the counterpart and counterpoise to Lilias. He wasn’t a toff, but he came from a privileged family and had been educated at Edinburgh’s most prestigious private school. While Lilias went her way with blitheness and grace, there was a turbulence in Geoff that suggested inner struggle. Charming and handsome, he was a glamorous figure who could be moody and silent towards his colleagues; but he was always there for the troubled. For them he had unlimited patience. They invaded his life and kipped on the floor of his Cleland Street flat, boys on the lam, families at their wits’ end. Unlike Lilias who never seemed to be on duty, Geoff never seemed to be off duty, or never allowed himself to be. I found him intellectually more interesting than Lilias, and temperamentally closer. Lilias was as transparent as a well of clear water; but for a divided nature like mine her purity sometimes prompted the sadness of self-reproach. With Geoff it was different. I sensed that he also wrestled with demons. I remember discussing a story in a radical Christian magazine about a gay American priest with a drink problem who, in spite of his self-loathing, had become an instrument of grace and redemption to a street gang in one of New York’s most violent slums. I confessed to Geoff that there was a verse in the gospels that troubled and consoled me in equal measure. It was what the religious leaders had spat at Jesus as he hung on the cross: He saved others; himself he cannot save. Geoff understood that tension. He understood the paradox of grace: that through their very flaws, troubled men could become instruments of grace for others but never for themselves. They saved others; themselves they cannot save. It was part of that other paradox, that God was found only among the poor. In existential terms, that meant finding him in our own poverty. It was not the devout and morally successful who had understood Jesus and gathered round him. It was the desperate and defeated, the people who had let themselves down – the disappointed.

  One of the hot theologians at the time was an exile from Nazi Germany who had made his reputation in the United States, where he was a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, at which Geoff and Walter had studied. Paul Tillich understood inner duality and the anguish of longing for a state of being he was incapable of achieving. Going the rounds was a sermon he had preached on the subject:

  Do we know what it means to be struck by grace? It does not mean that we suddenly believe that God exists, or that Jesus is the Saviour, or that the Bible contains the truth. Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual . . . It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.40

  This made sense to Geoff and me. It made sense to follow what might have been described as a theology of failure, because it not only captured our own confusion, it also seemed to be true to the downside-up message of Jesus. Theologically close we might have been, but the big difference between us was that Geoff also had a heroic commitment to what he did. We could use the same theological language, but our actions were different. I was a dabbler. He went deep. I was a leaver. He was a stayer. I knew I was a bit of a fraud. Like Lilias, Geoff was the real thing.

  What I did not understand at the time was that the essential difference between me and Lilias and Geoff was my low boredom threshold. Unlike them, I was no good at the steady grind of routine caring. I was drawn to the excitement of campaigning because it ignited my interest and suppressed the boredom that squatted deep inside me like a toad in a well. It would be the same when I had children of my own and was left in charge of them. I was hopeless. I either excited them to the point of hysteria with the games we played, or had them asleep before bedtime so that I could get on with what interested me. Poets notice these things. It was with a pang I discovered Hugh MacDiarmid’s words on the subject and realised what opportunities I had lost by my inability to endure.

  I love my little son, and yet when he was ill

  I could not confine myself to his bedside.

  I was impatient of his squalid little needs,

  His laboured breathing and the fretful way he cried

  And longed for my wide range of interests again,

  Whereas his mother sank without another care

  To that dread level of nothing but life itself

  And stayed day and night, till he was better, there.

  Women may pretend, yet they always dismiss

  Everything but mere being just like this.41

  Lilias and Geoff were always capable of the patience of ‘mere being just like this’. I never was. I lacked constancy. Constancy is an endowment of the self that marks the good off from the rest of fitful, flitting humanity. I wanted to be good, but knew I wasn’t. Yet here I was, working with two people of different but equally remarkable goodness. Unsurprisingly, I occasionally fell into dejection as I compared myself with them.

  Since heroically good people are rare, it is hardly surprising that they provoke envy in the rest of us. Envy has been described as ‘sorrow at another’s good’, which is why it is the saddest sin in the book. Because it is such a mean affair, we rarely admit to it. We may confess other, more positive sins with relish, but we are rarely prepared to admit that another’s grace has made us sad. We find corrosive envy expressed in other spheres, such as the critic, perhaps an unsuccessful writer, who is caustic in his criticism of a better writer who has won a
cclaim. But the saddest manifestation of this human fault has to be envy of the good for being good. It is really a sorrow for ourselves that life has dealt us a less attractive hand to play. Moral goodness is not unlike those other accidents of the genetic and social lottery, good looks. Some people are physically beautiful, most people are not. Rather than rejoicing that the good and the beautiful exist at all, it is all too human to fall into sadness because we ourselves have not been so endowed – understandable, but unattractive. Indeed, envy at the endowments of others has ugly physical manifestations: a tightening of the features, as the face constricts into a sneer; behind the eyes a lurking sorrow and from the mouth an ugly contempt. I remember a friend responding to another’s justified reputation for goodness, ‘And I suppose he shits custard’.